Monday, March 8, 2010

Highly Leveraged Food

Below is a link to an excellent Grist.org article comparing GMOs to mortgage-backed-securities. Quite a compelling argument for anyone at all interested in, say, eating.


http://www.grist.org/article/gmos-as-financial-innovations

The author, Tom Laskawy, and the blogger he quoted, Felix Salmon, eloquently put into words what I've long felt but often stumbled over how to express, specifically why I'm so hesitant to see GMOs as any sort of good answer to anything, even if IRRI says it's OK if done the "right" way.

Salmon concludes, "Essentially, you’re trading a large number of small problems for a small probability that at some point you’re going to have an absolutely enormous problem." As we discovered the hard way with mortgage-backed-securities, however, small probability events sometimes do happen.

I know it's still too complex of an issue to summarize with any one pithy analogy, but this is a point that cannot be disregarded either.

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